The piece outlines the experience of a company transitioning from AWS to bare metal, highlighting significant cost savings and operational improvements. Initially, the switch saved $230,000 annually, but that figure has now risen to over $1.2 million as the business has scaled. They attribute this to several factors, including the elimination of certain AWS charges, like S3 and egress fees, and the removal of extra costs tied to services like EKS. Their bare-metal setup reportedly offers a 76% cost advantage over AWS. The migration process required minimal engineering time, allowing the team to formalize infrastructure-as-code and optimize their setup. Ongoing operational costs are low, with only about 24 engineer-hours needed each quarter. They've established multiple racks across different data centers to address concerns about single points of failure, deploying strategies like asynchronous replication and alternative management paths for added resilience. The performance metrics are impressive, boasting 99.993% availability over the past two years and avoiding AWS's recent downtimes. In terms of compliance and audits, the company maintained its SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications during the transition. They improved change management practices with tools like Terraform and Talos, which auditors found favorable. Despite some critiques regarding the decision to recreate services available in the cloud, the team argues that running their open stack aligns with their product promise of portability, and they still leverage AWS for specific needs like Glacier backups and edge caching.